The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and may not constitute prior art.
A surveillance system is usually composed of different types of devices. Each device provides certain functionalities, image data, and meta data information. To control those devices, to acquire the data from devices, and to store those data information into the data sources, the surveillance system application developers need to make a great deal of effort to learn and implement different access APIs and data access modules for particular data sources in order to integrate the entire surveillance system. Thus, the development cost for such systems can be quite high.
In addition, since the meta data may be distributed all over the network of the surveillance systems, it is difficult for the application programs to know where those data resided, and it is inefficient for the application programs to search each instance of data. For example, when a surveillance system is deployed, different databases that store the meta data are likely used for such a system. This database diversity requires each application to define different types of data schema for the different databases. XML has emerged as a standard data-exchange approach for many applications. Thus, these applications require the data management involving XML. However, the existing data source management continues to be relational or other types of DB. The current system lacks of a bridge to satisfy the requirement of these new XML-based applications leveraging existing data sources, such as a relational DB. This lack causes high deployment costs.